The number of microarray and other high-throughput
experiments on primary repositories keeps increasing
as do the size and complexity of the results
in response to biomedical investigations. Initiatives
have been started on standardization of content, object
model, exchange format and ontology. However, there
are backlogs and inability to exchange data between microarray
repositories, which indicate that there is a great
need for a standard format and data management.
We have introduced a metadata framework that
includes a metadata card and semantic nets that make
experimental results visible, understandable and usable.
These are encoded in syntax encoding schemes
and represented in RDF (Resource Description Frameword),
can be integrated with other metadata cards and
semantic nets, and can be exchanged, shared and queried.
We demonstrated the performance and potential
benefits through a case study on a selected microarray
repository. We concluded that the backlogs can be reduced
and that exchange of information and asking of
knowledge discovery questions can become possible
with the use of this metadata framework.